My 2nd Year at OSU: A Melodrama

My second year at OSU was one Big Bang that’s ending with a nice fizzle.

Freshman year was an easy reflection. Thanks friends, thanks family, etc. The usual narrative. This year ran a lot deeper than that.

My second hear at OSU has easily been the densest of my life. Full disclosure: I have been both the best and worst versions of myself. I have behaved in ways I know other versions of myself would find deplorable, and I watch myself with that eye. I have also learned to taste the sweetness of life in an unprecedented way.

The worst parts of this year have shown me that life is colorful. I sit off of 18th and High St and look around. This year colored this view with so many memories. I have cried in this place and that, and have laughed right here and right there.

This year I learned that everything is meaningful. Every experience. Every human that I contact in my life (even the passerby).

This year I learned to be patient with myself.

This year I learned what I value as an artist and a human.

This year I took a critical view at the way I chose for the past 20 years to live my life.

This year I learned that I rely way too much on others. I am practicing existing for myself.

It took two years of being away from the safety of Warren, New Jersey to finally start to want to learn who I am as my own individual person.

I haven’t said many words here. I am just a 20-year-old going about the typical journey of her undergraduate career. There are still so many things I need to learn and want to fix about myself. I want to think that specific events will be the answer. But now I am beginning to think that the journey of life itself is the answer. The pit falls and the aggravations. The nights crying myself to sleep because I am poignantly aware that I’m not enough or that I cant stop myself from doing wrong. But also the absolute joys.

I hit rock bottom this year. Not because of anything specific that happened. I hit rock bottom as a human being. I am not proud of who I have been at times, and at other times I am wildly proud of myself. The times I am most proud of are the most subtle, like the times I was able to help someone with a small gesture, or the times that I was able to smile and enjoy myself on a particularly hard day. But I am also proud of myself as an artist. And that is why I am here, to grow as an artist.

I have never grown more than I have in the past nine months.

So I haven’t said many words. But it took me about fifteen personal journal entries to decide that this is what I think is most important to share about this year on my blog:

Life is so colorful and beautiful, and the deeper the shades, the tastier and more beautiful it is. This year was hard… and this year was beautiful.